Redemption Ark

‘Bunch of overpaid wankers is what I call them,’ Antoinette said.

‘It was your idea to come here in the first place,’ Xavier responded.

There was a bar built into the nose cone of the ruined ship. Clavain tactfully suggested that they situate themselves as unobtrusively as possible. They found a table in one corner, next to a cavernous tank of bubbling water. Squid floated in the water, their conic bodies flickering with commercials.

A gibbon brought beers. They attacked them with enthusiasm, even Clavain, who had no particular taste for alcohol. But the drink was cold and refreshing and he would have gladly drunk anything in the current spirit of celebration. He just hoped he would not spoil things by revealing how gloomy he really felt.

‘So, Clavain…’ Antoinette said. ‘Are you going to tell us what this is all about, or are you just going to leave us wondering?’

‘You know who I am,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She glanced at Xavier. ‘We think so. You didn’t deny it before.’

‘You know that I defected once already, in that case.’

‘A way back,’ Antoinette said.

Clavain noticed that she was peeling the label from her beer bottle with great care. ‘Sometimes it seems like only yesterday. But it was four hundred years ago, give or take the odd decade. For most of that time I have been more than willing to serve my people. Defecting certainly isn’t something I take lightly.’

‘So why the big change of heart?’ she asked.

‘Something very bad is going to happen. I can’t say what exactly — I don’t know the full story — but I know enough to say that there’s a threat, an external threat, which is going to pose a great danger to all of us. Not just Conjoiners, not just Demarchists, but all of us. Ultras. Skyjacks. Even you.’

Xavier glared into his beer. ‘And on that cheering note…’

‘I didn’t mean to spoil things. That’s just the way it is. There’s a threat, and we’re all in trouble, and I wish it were otherwise.’

‘What kind of threat?’ Antoinette asked.

‘If what I learned was correct, then it’s alien. For some time now, we — the Conjoiners, rather — have known that there are hostile entities out there. I mean actively hostile, not just occasionally dangerous and unpredictable, like the Pattern Jugglers or Shrouders. And I mean extant, in the sense that they’ve posed a real threat to some of our expeditions. We call them the wolves. We think that they’re machines, and that somehow we’ve only now begun to trigger a response from them.’ Clavain paused, certain now that he had the attention of his young hosts. He was not overly concerned about revealing what were technically Conjoiner secrets; in a very short while he hoped to be saying exactly the same things to the Demarchist authorities. The quicker the news was spread, the better.

‘And these machines…?’ Antoinette said. ‘How long have you known about them?’

‘Long enough. For decades we were aware of the wolves, but it seemed they wouldn’t cause us any local difficulties provided that we took certain precautions. That’s why we stopped building starships. They were luring the wolves to us, like beacons. Only now we’ve found a way to make our ships quieter. There’s a faction in the Mother Nest, led — or influenced, at the very least — by Skade.’

‘You’ve mentioned that name already,’ Xavier said.

‘Skade’s chasing me down. She doesn’t want me to reach the authorities because she knows how dangerous the information I hold is.’

‘And this faction, what have they been doing?’

‘Building an exodus fleet,’ Clavain told Antoinette. ‘I’ve seen it. It’s easily large enough to carry all the Conjoiners in this system. They’re planning on evacuating, basically. They’ve determined that a full-scale wolf attack is imminent — that’s my guess, anyway — and they’ve decided that the best thing they can do is run away.’

‘What’s so abhorrent about that?’ Xavier asked. ‘We’d do the same thing if it meant saving our skins.’

‘Perhaps,’ Clavain said, feeling a weird admiration for the young man’s cynicism. ‘But there’s an added complication. Some time ago the Conjoiners manufactured a stockpile of doomsday weapons. And I mean doomsday weapons — nothing like them has ever been made again. They were lost, but now they’ve been found again. The Conjoiners are trying to get their hands on them, hoping that they’ll be an additional safeguard against the wolves.’

‘Where are they?’ Antoinette asked.

‘Near Resurgam, in the Delta Pavonis system. About twenty years’ flight time from here. Someone — whoever now owns the weapons — has re-armed them, causing them to emit diagnostic signals that we picked up. That’s worrying in itself. The Mother Nest was putting together a recovery squad which they, not unnaturally, wanted me to lead.’

‘Wait a sec,’ Xavier said. ‘You’d go all the way there just to pick up a bunch of lost weapons? Why not make new ones?’

‘The Conjoiners can’t,’ Clavain said. ‘It’s as simple as that. These weapons were made a long time ago according to principles which were deliberately forgotten after their construction.’